Candi Plaosan Lor

I fortunate enough to squeeze four days of fieldwork into my time in Jogjakarta before the rains moved in. It's rainy season, and so traveling in rural Indonesia can be a challenge, especially when your main mode of transportation is a motorbike. Once it started to rain, it didn't stop for almost a week. Extremely frustrating. After a few days I started getting stir crazy.

One morning around 6:30 am, I looked outside to the sun shining. I got pretty darn excited and jumped on my motorbike. I figured I had time for one of my favorite activities before it would start raining again: visiting ruins!

This time I was headed for Candi Plaosan Lor, a set of temples a short distance from Prambanan, one of the famous sites in Jogja. I had never been to Plaosan before.

It's a set of two main temples surrounded by 58 smaller temples as well as 194 stupas. Pretty impressive.

The restoration of the temples began during the Dutch colonial period. The Indonesian government has continued the project, although at a very slow pace.

As you can tell, it was raining by the time I arrived. I got soaked. A nice lady lent me her umbrella as I walked around the ruins.

 I love the decorations on the temples. I wish I could pick up some door frames like this for my house.

Yes, it might be tacky, but if you came to visit, you'd definitely remember which house was mine.

Little dogs crawl out of the mouths of snakes. Great stuff.

Temple guardians are great. They carry a cobra in one hand and a huge club in the other. If some guy came up to you with a cobra in his hand, you'd take him serious, even if he was wearing a skirt.

Inside the temples, representatives of the gods flank stands for religious items. I imagine that they are for the lingga and yoni, but I really wasn't sure for these temples. There were no explanatory signs.

Anyways, it was worth getting a little water-logged to have the temple all to myself for an hour.